Africa’s Independence is Overrated...

If your part of Africa is different, may you inspire the rest, and excuse the generalisation - where assessment of general conduct is being made, sweeping remarks are usually unavoidable - and considering all things that in some way constitute what we call independence or sovereignty, I consider Africa’s overrated.

We are largely in dependence, if not deeper dependence. How we astonishingly choose to define our national realities in our various Constitutions doesn’t matter to me, as long as we remain that continent that every other continent sees as one to be helped, saved, or fixed, we are not independent.

As long as every Afro-foreign relationship remains at the mercy of ultimatums, imposition of policies and structural adjustments, expressions of threats of coercive measures intended to ensure compliance, or acceptance of things that we would otherwise reject if we were independent, we are not independent.

As long as we keep presenting our continent as one absent of rationality, so much that any knowledge or advice from a non-skin-folk makes more sense to us than all our learned kinfolks combined, especially when it comes to economic thinking, we are not independent.

As long as those diamond diggers in Sierra Leone and Angola still earn less than a dollar a day, with their children being a part of the workforce, or some Ivorian or Ghanaian cocoa farming community can hardly afford chocolate bars for their kids, owing to the price pegged by the high-end producer, we are not independent.

If you ask me, the only independence we have is the independence to hold our own summits, and all we do in there is to confess admiration for Western lifestyle, respect for China, particularly for not following the dictates of the West on its way to economic success, and how Dubai and Singapore can be exemplary models of economic development for us, but that's it, until the high-level meeting after that.